Within His View

Within His View is a first-person observation horror game set in an Appalachian logging cabin in 2005. As Sophie Pinewood, you take over the desk, keys and analog monitors left by your father, private detective James Pinewood, and spend one night investigating what he was pursuing before he stopped answering. Your shift runs from 0:00 to 7:00.

Watch the cabin

Seven live CCTV feeds show rooms elsewhere in the cabin, while you sit in a room with three directions of darkness: left, right and the doorway behind you. You can pan the cameras, light dark corners and listen to the feed you have open; sounds in other rooms are inaudible until you view them. Turning away from the monitors to check your own room leaves the cameras unwatched, and the cabin can change while you are looking elsewhere. Even the menu appears in the room.

The game asks you to watch both places, though you cannot do so at once. The software tells you which rooms changed and how many times, but not what changed.

Identify anomalies

You must report each anomaly in one of six categories:

• Object Move: an object leaves one place and appears in another.
• Object Missing: an object that belongs in the room is gone.
• Object Added: something appears that was not there before.
• Visual Entity: a whole figure stands in the room.
• Audio Anomaly: a sound has no source.
• Light Anomaly: the room is lit incorrectly.

The categories have strict rules: for example, a severed arm on the kitchen floor counts as an object added, not an entity. A wrong report costs three seconds and some of your mind, and guessing blindly is punished.

Search the rooms

The game contains over 800 handcrafted anomalies, with no procedural generation. Each was modelled, textured and animated by hand and given its own sound. Many conceal something: furniture can cover what is beneath it, and after you file a report and reality settles, the covering returns without cleaning up what it hid.

Face the Wendigo

The Wendigo appears on the cameras but hunts in your room. It makes no footsteps or breathing sounds and gives no audio warning; while your attention is elsewhere, it moves closer one doorway at a time until it stands at your shoulder. Turning to face it raises your flashlight, and meeting its eyes drives it back. But doing so also freezes you in place, hands off the mouse, for as long as it wants, leaving the monitors unattended.

Manage your sanity

There is no health bar. Your screen cracks as your mind deteriorates, while what appears in the room provides further signs of your condition. Sanity drains throughout the night. Correct reports slow the loss, but nothing stops it.

Difficulties and catalog

Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare unlock in order. Each difficulty sends more anomalies per night, gives you less time to report them, makes changes subtler and makes the Wendigo faster. Identified anomalies are added to your catalog and remain there if you die. The catalog has no gallery to browse; it displays a count, such as “Found: 412 / 800.”

Play with an audience

The game is designed for you to play with someone watching and calling out directions: they can keep track of the seven cameras and your surroundings while you cannot. The game can still kill you anyway.